It depends who you ask. Psychology is supposed to be the study of the mind. The problem is nobody is sure what the mind is or what all it does.
However, there is some consensus, at least in the advertising world. The mind is what tells you that you want a beer that tastes great AND is less filling and that you want to enjoy the taste of a candy mint and have the power of a breath mint. The mind informs us of what drugs we will take to manage our moods and what food we will eat for dinner to either lose weight or comfort ourselves. It’s the first part of us that impels our bodies to raise a hand or rise from a chair. It informs us that we are upset when a loved one dies or that we are secretly happy when someone we hate dies violently. It tells us if we are going to go to college or try to get on Welfare. It is the part of us that looks at the stars in wonder or that watches TV while thinking that we are doing something meaningful. Surely there is some part of our anatomy that makes us do all these things. For some unknown reason, we call those actions of the three pounds of ugly fat floating in our skulls, the part of us that makes us decide to do, then do these myriad things, ‘the mind’. And everybody has one.
Yet there are some psychologists who see the mind as a black box, the contents of which cannot be directly known. There are others who see it as a bunch of neuro-chemicals that can be adjusted to make us happier and, except for these chemicals, all is superfluous. There are still others who see the mind as ineffable, a source of such incredible wonder that it can never be known. Finally, there are those who, like good behavioral scientists, think that if you poke the mind with some treatment and measure how far and in which direction the person jumps, we can learn the mind’s processes. We may recognize these diverse views as the domain of scientists or mystics, but, if we are to be accurate, we must acknowledge that these are all examples of the mind studying itself. We should all be silent and reverent when there are minds at work.
The mind is natively narcissistic. From the moment of our appearance in the world, people have a preferred point of view, their own. They will interpret all their experiences as if there were no other way to understand things, but their own. However, when the world intrudes on our experience, there is seldom any place for us to hide and we cannot forestall that encounter for very long.
Because most studies of psychology look at the mind from within a laboratory or a test-tube, most of the information that the studies yield is practically useless. It would be useful to figure out how to get a leg inside your pants if you are too depressed to move or what is the best action to take when someone is shooting at you. These decisions are best made in context, not in a test-tube. These decisions are enriched by experience, not by research.
Survival psych is an attempt to understand people by experience and, therefore, Survival Psych views all living things in context. If one were to raise a child in a box, like B. F. Skinner’s, the child would have limited opportunity to freely explore and experience. Raise the same child in a world that is restricted to computers and it will have to discover its environment by guessing what is out there through the messages that the child receives on the screen, a necessarily distorted view. It will neither discover the richness of its actual environment nor learn about the tool that it was given to learn about the environment, the mind. For this reason, Survival Psych is a study of life and death as well as everything in between. It is a stepping into the cauldron that is our birthright to discover meanings in the world outside our all-encompassing heads.
Lecture 1: What Is Psychology?
